sey075

  My Endnote database just passed 20,000 references. I was getting psyched out about seeing the 20,000th reference, but then of course I went along merrily adding references and forgot to savor the moment. Now it has 20,001. I just got a new computer, with Windows 7 and Office 2010, and I upgraded other computers. So of course Endnote X3 isn't compatible with Word 2010 and I had to upgrade Endnote to version X6. Not too different. 20,001 references, it reminds me of the movie "20,001: A Bibliography Odyssey." The aliens plant an obelisk that teaches the ape-people how to construct databases for citations. They get all their information into the database, but then Hal locks them out and they lose everything. "Open the database door, Hal!"   "I'm sorry, Dave. You won't be able to use your citations anymore." Now was this the original movie, or am I mixing it up with my bibliography nightmare?

Most review of manuscripts for journals are rather pedestrian. This part is fine, that part needs work, the text on the map can't be read at that scale, cite so-and-so, cite me, etc. Sometimes the reviews are more memorable, either in a positive or a negative fashion. Here are my recollections of three reviews of manuscripts of mine by reviewers for journals. They follow a progression from amusing to annoying. 1. Cite yourself. Brian Tomasewski and I published a paper in the Journal of Historical Geography . This was an analysis of places in the Toluca Valley, based on the spatial depiction of the specific towns mentioned in individual native historical sources. We used those data to make come inferences about changing political dynamics. The journal sent the manuscript blind to reviewers--that is, the authors' names were omitted. One reviewer provided a helpful detailed review, but complained that the paper didn't cite Michael Smith's work sufficiently! Smith has worke...

Are academic archaeologists obsessed with significance? Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I am putting the final touches on a grant proposal being submitted jointly by archaeologists and some (non-anthropological) social scientists.At a meeting yesterday the sociologist and political scientist surprised me by questioning the "significance" section of the proposal. I review lots of proposals, student and senior, for NSF and Wenner-Gren, and there is almost always a section that describes the "significance" of the research. I always include such a section in my proposals. I insist that my students include a significance section. But these other scholars had rarely seen such a section in proposals in their discipline. Why do we need this? they asked. We had placed a "significance" section at the end of the proposal in which we stated the significance of the research for each of the four disciplines represented among the PIs, and then we outlined the import...